Technology is by nature in an adversarial role. "China hasn’t been an easy market for foreign companies in many sectors. Technology is particularly fraught because it influences the way people think and thus is being brought under ever tighter control by Mr. Xi’s government."

China's regime doesn't conform to the expectations of many tech leaders. “'Zuckerberg and so forth have many illusions about China,' says Chen Zhiwu, director of Asia Global Institute and professor of economics at the University of Hong Kong. Chief among them, he said, is a tendency to see Chinese leaders as economic pragmatists and play down political statements. 'They should understand it’s really different this time,' he says."

A Girl Scout works on a laptop computer June 21, 2017. U.S. Girl Scouts who master the required skills can attach to their uniform's sash the first of 18 cyber security badges that will be rolled out in September 2018.

Girl Scouts of the USA/Handout via REUTERS

DOWNLOAD EXTRA: AI BIAS IS REAL AND NEEDS FIXING

Artificial intelligence is becoming an inexorable part of our daily lives, which is why experts say it's critical that we address its biases now, lest we end up with more discrimination in everything from job recruiting to criminal justice. AI will add trillions of dollars to the economy within the next decade, said Tess Posner, executive director at AI4All, a nonprofit organization that works to increase diversity in the AI industry. She and other AI experts spoke Tuesday at a conference hosted by New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering Future Labs startup program. A homogenous group of white, male technologists and researchers is largely responsible for building AI systems, while women and minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics are largely left out, she said.

Today, many young girls and minorities lack relatable role models in AI, she said. "The field is often not inclusive and welcoming to those who are not the dominant group," Ms. Posner said. Exposing the country's youth to artificial intelligence at an early age is paramount, she said. She also suggested that AI and machine-learning startups prioritize diversity and inclusion from the get-go, when they’re looking for a co-founder or hiring their first software engineers. Amanda Levendowski, a teaching fellow at NYU School of Law, said at the event that AI bias will likely continue until copyright laws are relaxed. "Very few AI creators can afford to acquire or license training data" without infringing on copyrights, she said. Many AI systems are trained using easily accessible data from the 1.6 million emails exchanged between employees during the Enron scandal, Ms. Levendowski said. This corpus is one of the largest public domain databases of real emails in the world and has been used by computer scientists to train systems for fraud detection, counterterrorism and prioritizing messages in inboxes, according to MIT Technology Review. It’s also used to study gender biases and power dynamics, Ms. Levendowski said.

Audra Koklys Plummer, head of AI design at Capital One Financial Corp., says biases can travel from teams into AI systems. That's why her 12-person team is comprised of former anthropologists, journalists, video game designers and filmmakers, she said. They recently worked on the bank's gender-neutral AI-powered chatbot. (More on Eno below.) "Not only is there diversity in race and gender but also diversity in our backgrounds, and that’s incredibly important," said Ms. Koklys Plummer, who spent six years helping to create fictional characters at The Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar Animation Studios. -- Sara Castellanos

The animator behind Capital One’s chatbot. When designing its AI chatbot, Eno, Capital One Financial Corp. drew on the experience of an animation pro from Pixar. Audra Koklys Plummer, now Capital One’s head of AI design, has tried to give the text-based digital assistant compelling character traits like empathy and humor, similar to how Pixar developed characters in films. “I was convinced that [we] could create a connection on an emotional level that we haven’t seen before in this industry,” Ms. Koklys Plummer tells CIO Journal.

Element AI adds IBM exec. Element AI Inc., one of Canada’s best-funded artificial intelligence startups, hired a senior International Business Machines Corp. executive as the company prepares to grow its business outside the North American market, David George-Cosh writes for CIO Journal. Linda Bernardi, former chief innovation officer for IBM’s cloud computing and Internet of Things businesses, will lead Element AI’s growth and product strategy, and will focus on working with Fortune 100 companies to “help them think from an AI-first mindset,” she said.

Rent-A-Center CIO departing for Novant Health. Angela Yochem plans to step down as CIO of Rent-A-Center Inc. at the end of the year, taking the newly created role of chief digital officer at Novant Health in January, CIO Journal’s Kim S. Nash reports. Ms. Yochem will focus on using technology to improve interactions with patients, and also will oversee the roll-out of digital media technology across Novant Health’s hospitals, physician practices and outpatient centers in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, the company said.

TECH EARNINGS

Members of the public line up outside an Apple Store in Birmingham, U.K., Nov. 3, 2017, as the iPhone X goes on-sale.

Zuma Press

Apple revenue, profit jumps by double digits. Apple Inc. extended its year-long rebound in the latest quarter thanks to rising iPhone demand, and the tech giant projected record revenue in the current quarter driven by sales of its highest-priced iPhone model ever, the Journal’s Tripp Mickle writes. Shipments of the company’s flagship product rose 2.6% from a year earlier to 46.7 million units. Sales in China, a critical market for Apple, rose for the first time since early 2016. Long lines formed Friday at Apple stores around the world with customers waiting for the $1,000 iPhone X.

Alibaba uses data to drive profit. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s net income more than doubled in a blockbuster second quarter, as the Chinese e-commerce giant used its huge trove of customer data to drive spending and attract more advertising, the Journal reports. Revenue from the company’s core commerce unit rose 63% to 46.5 billion yuan.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Bojan Antolovic, a Tetra Pak Services system specialist, demonstrates using Microsoft's HoloLens to fix the Swiss liquid-packaging company's equipment at the Hannover Messe trade show in Germany in April.

TETRA PAK

Microsoft’s augmented reality strategy: not just for gamers. The company is steering its HoloLens augmented reality headset to the workplace, targeting corporate trainers, designers, pilots and repair technicians, the Journal’s Jay Greene reports. Microsoft Corp.’s bid for commanding position in AR and VR is critical, analysts say, as the devices usher in new ways for people to interact with software through gestures, voice and even the direction they gaze.

Trouble ahead for AT&T-Time Warner deal? The Justice Department is laying the groundwork for a potential lawsuit challenging AT&T Inc.’s planned acquisition of Time Warner Inc. if the government and companies can’t agree on a settlement, people familiar with the matter tell the Journal. The department’s antitrust division is preparing for litigation in case it decides to sue to block the deal, while the department and companies are discussing possible settlement terms that would lead to the deal winning approval with conditions attached.

Donald Trump disappeared from Twitter for 11 minutes. Twitter Inc. blamed an employee’s error for the brief outage of President Donald Trump’s account Thursday evening that quickly became one of the messaging platform’s buzziest topics, the Journal’s Georgia Wells reports. Twitter said the error was made by a customer-support employee on his or her last day of work at the company. “We are conducting a full internal review,” Twitter said in a statement. In an official tweet, the company said it would be “taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”

Ukraine hit by more phishing attacks during BadRabbit. Hackers tried to access confidential data in stealthy phishing attacks launched in parallel with the ransomware strike called BadRabbit last week, the head of the Ukrainian state cyber police Serhiy Demedyuk told the Reuters Cyber Security Summit in Kiev. Mr. Demedyuk said it was a kind of “hybrid attack” that is becoming more common. “There is an open, let’s say instantly obvious attack, while underneath there is a hidden, fairly well-thought-out attack, to which nobody pays attention,” he said.

HP Enterprise moving headquarters. In an effort to cut costs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is packing up its headquarters in Palo Alto and moving to neighboring Santa Clara, Bloomberg reports. HPE plans to sell its building in Palo Alto and move employees to nearby cities including Milpitas and San Jose. In Santa Clara, the “state-of-the-art” offices of wireless networking company Aruba, which HPE bought in 2015, will become the new headquarters.

Tesla eyes China plant by 2019. Elon Musk, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive, said in a conference call with analysts that the company plans to make cars and sport-utility vehicles in China in about three years, in a bid to make pricey electric vehicles more appealing to local buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports. It was unclear whether the move allows Tesla to avoid costly tariffs imposed by China on foreign automakers.

WHAT YOUR CEO IS READING

Visitors to Lapland can enjoy stunning views of the Northern Lights from the comfort of igloos made from glass. Oct. 20, 2017, Levi, Finland.

Zuma Press

A new force in global travel. Forget the group tours and luxury cruises, today’s young Chinese want to sand-surf in Dubai, sample U.S. sports bars and see reindeer close-up. Chinese age 18 to 34 made 82 million trips abroad in 2016, accounting for 60% of the country’s foreign travel and spending more than $150 billion, Bloomberg Intelligence estimates. That compares to just 75 million trips abroad made by Americans last year. Mastercard Inc. predicts Chinese outbound tourism is expected to grow 8.5% annually through 2021. The young travelers rely heavily on mobile apps such as WeChat and Weibo to research and book their trips, then tell their friends about it. Tourist destinations are using the same tools to lure them. What’s most yearned-for travel experience? Seeing the northern lights, says Silvia Wong, a former exchange student to Finland who co-founded an agency that arranges tours for Chinese tourists. “They want to stay in an igloo, go on an icebreaker, go on animal safaris,” she tells Businessweek.

Creds NOT to you, Ms. Speaking up in groups can signal leadership but who emerges on top often depends on -- don’t be shocked -- gender. In two studies, management experts found that the act of speaking out with ideas can elevate an individual’s status in a group, according to Harvard Business Review. Voicing problems, on the other hand, decidedly did not. The important wrinkle is this: Emerging leadership also depended on whether a man or a woman was doing the ideating. The studies looked at cadets at West Point and participants on the internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk. “Men who spoke up with ideas were seen as having higher status and were more likely to emerge as leaders. Women did not receive any benefits in status or leader emergence from speaking up, regardless of whether they did so promotively [with ideas] or prohibitively [about problems],” HBR reports. “The status bump and leader emergence that resulted from speaking up with ideas only happened for men, not for women.” Are we pointing out a problem here? At the risk of not being seen as a leader, you bet.

Bosses popularity contest. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. is in the midst of a lengthy process to choose its next managing director, and employees have a say. “McKinsey's top 550 partners gathered in London last week for what's seen as the unofficial kickoff of a convoluted three-tiered selection process that will go on for months,” reports CNN. The partners choose one from their own ranks (as long as he or she is under the age of 57) to vote into the top job, which comes in the form of a three-year term. Partners list their top seven choices, which will determine a pool of 10 contenders. Another round of voting in February will leave two standing for a final vote. Current managing director Dominic Barton is expected to step down in March. There’s no campaigning allowed, CNN says, and one hopes no Russian meddling.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

House Republicans, seeking the biggest transformation of the tax code in over 30 years, aim to permanently cut the corporate-tax rate from 35% to 20% and compress the number of individual brackets. (WSJ)

White men are starting to lose their boardroom dominance at the biggest U.S. businesses. Women or minorities account for half of the 397 new independent directors announced in 2017. (WSJ)

Jerome Powell, President Donald Trump’s pick to become the 16th chairman of the Federal Reserve, is likely to be a low-key pragmatist. (WSJ)

The Morning Download is edited by Kim S. Nash, Angus Loten and Steven Norton and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload.